were pinched off as tiny spheres about one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. No females of this jelly-fish were ever discovered. The polyps lived on from year to year, and budded off each season a swarm of pretty but futile male jelly-fish. They ripened and died on attaining a diameter somewhat less than that of a shilling. There were many most interesting points made out as to their structure, mode of feeding, and growth. You could keep them in a tall glass jar supported over a small gas-jet (they lived best at a temperature of 80° Fahr.), and they would swim up by a series of strokes to the top of the water, and then drop like little parachutes through the eighteen inches of depth to the bottom-taking in water-fleas and such food on the way and immediately would start upwards again. I used to take them alive in my pocket corked up in a test-tube to show to friends.

FIG. 4.-Four of the minute club-shaped polyps adhering to a root-fibre of a water-plant. The rounded end becomes nipped off and swims away, free, as a young jelly-fish.

After they had disappeared from the tank in Regent's Park (owing to some unhappy cleaning of the tank) they suddenly, in 1903, appeared - it seems incredible at Sheffield! Then they briefly showed up in 1905 at Munich, and at Lyons had been captured in 1901always in a tepid water-lily tank! We never could make out where they came from originally. Of course, the polyp must have been brought into the tank with some bundle of water plants from a tropical lake or river, but we never had any indication as to when or which.

Since the days of the fresh-water jelly-fish of Regent's Park, which was called (a name, but why should it not have a name?) Limnocodium Sowerbii-a jelly-fish of

about the same size (Fig. 5) but very different in shape and tentacles—was discovered in the great African freshwater lake Tanganyika-in enormous numbers, and was named Limnocnida Tanganyika. Only five years ago the same jelly-fish was discovered in the Victoria Nyanza, and a little earlier in backwaters of the Niger. It is a

FIG. 5.-The African fresh-water jelly-fish (Limnocnida) found in
Tanganyika, Victoria Nyanza, and the Niger.

curious and significant fact bearing upon the history of these three areas of fresh water connected with the three greatest African rivers-the Congo, the Nile, and the Niger-thatthe same little jelly-fish is found in all of

them.

And now we have just been reminded of Limnocodium, the Regent's Park jelly-fish, from a remote and unexpected

source.

A thousand miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang River, in China, in the province of Hupi, the Japanese captain of a river steamer, plying there and belonging to a Japanese company, captured ten jelly-fish in the muddy waters of the river. He brought them home, preserved, I suppose, in alcohol or formalin, and they have been described by Dr. Oka, a Japanese zoologist of Tokio, in a publication bearing the Latin title Annotationes Zoologica niponenses, issued in December 1907. European sea captains have not rarely been ardent naturalists, but I think the Japanese is the first captain of a river steamboat who has discovered a new animal on his beat. I have not heard of Mississippi steamboat captains amusing themselves in this way-other rivers, other tastes.

Dr. Oka describes the jelly-fish thus brought to him as a Limnocodium, differing in a few details from that of Regent's Park, so that he distinguishes this Chinese species as Limnocodium Kawaii, naming it after the naturalist captain, who must have a rare taste for picking up strange and new things, and a rare goodwill in bringing them home with him. So here is another fresh-water jelly-fish, for it is not the same as the Regent's Park one, though closely like it. Possibly Limnocodium is an Asiatic genus, and the original Sowerby's Limnocodium will be found in another Chinese river. But it may prove to be South American, as is the water-lily Victoria regia.

A very small fresh-water jelly-fish was found some twelve years ago-in 1897-in the Delaware River at Philadelphia, United States, and was lately described by the well-known naturalist, Mr. Potts. It was budded off from a very minute polyp resembling that found in the Regent's Park, but the jelly-fish was totally different from Limnocodium. Only four or five specimens of this jelly-fish have ever been seen, and the Philadelphian naturalists ought certainly to look it up again.

An account of the Philadelphian jelly-fish and of other fresh-water jelly-fishes, with illustrative plates, will be found in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, 1906. Mr. Charles Boulenger has, in the same Journal, 1908, described yet another fresh-water jelly-fish from the Fayoum Lake in Egypt.

IX

THE STORY OF THE COMMON EEL

HOUGH the Scotch Highlanders are said to have a

profound objection to eating eels on account of the resemblance of these fish to snakes (not a very good reason, since the quality and not the shape of what one eats is the important thing), yet eels have been a very popular delicacy in England in past days. Eel-pie Island, at Richmond, is known to most Londoners, and eel-pie shops were familiar in London less than a century ago. A good Thames eel is still appreciated by the few people who nowadays take some small amount of intelligent interest in what they eat. Abroad, eels are still popular. Eel-traps are still worked in the rivers. In such districts as the flat country, on the shores of the Adriatic, near Venice, millions of young eels are annually "shepherded " in lagoons and reservoirs, and reared to marketable size. The inland eel-fisheries of Denmark and Germany are carefully regulated and encouraged by the Government in those States.

The fact is that railways, ice-storage, and steamtrawling have, in conjunction, revolutionised our habits in regard to the use of fish as a daily article of diet. Fresh-water fish are now almost unknown as a regular source of food in the British Islands. The splendid fish of the North Sea, the Channel, and the Atlantic coast